So we had a break in at our house in Pflugerville on Monday... Jessica and Mia left home around 9am, and then at 12:30pm I got a call from the PD... The robbers had been spotted at another house and their license plate was reported by a good citizen... Cops caught up with them and found our checkbook in their car, and then called me... We actually got 90% of our stuff back... Jessica's jewelry, Tv's, iPad, android tablet, xbox, games, movies, etc were all taken and recovered, and back in our house 3 hours later... They caught 3 of the 4 assholes, with the last one having a warrant out now... What they did not recover was our laptop (macbook pro), $1500 in really good Wusthof Classic kitchen knives, an old digital camera, and a cordless drill... Possibly some other stuff, but nothing so important we haven't noticed it yet...

I did "Find My Mac" via iCloud and the macbook showed up online for 5 minutes in Round Rock yesterday... Gave the cops the address it was at, waiting to hear back on that... I did a remote lock on it so they won't be able to get into the operating system, but it will still connect to wifi/network to report where it is...

Nobody was home, and our cats and dog were safe, which is the most important thing... They waited for the house to be empty, and then tried prying off the security/screen door in the backyard... When they failed at that they used a long screwdriver and pressure to pop open a window in the back... I've installed a security bar last night on any windows not viewable from the two cross streets (we live on a corner lot), and locking thumbscrew window locks on all the downstairs windows... Having an alarm from SimpliSafe installed in a few days...

F crackheads... The cops said the house that the rest of our crap in was pretty f'ed up and trashed

Forgot to mention, I have a month old external hard drive backup of our pictures and music and such from the laptop, and we changed passwords for everything on monday night... Cancelled all the checks that they had in their possession for a few hours, changing the account number on our bank account today...

When they took the checks, we are lucky the missed our passports/SSN cards/birth certs in the same drawer... I was supposed to go get a safe deposit box last week for that stuff but ran out of time

Pretty creepy to think of people going through our house. They didn't close drawers they opened, so very happy to know our dresser doors were closed. They missed a bigger stash of Jessica's jewelry also. We are getting a maid to wipe this place clean

Update: Found a Facebook group a few months ago where people sell stolen electronics in Austin. I've been searching it every two weeks or so for my laptop when bored at work. About two weeks ago I found one for sale with same model and specs as mine. Hit the guy up, and he sent me some pictures a few days ago. Zooming in on the picture of the bottom of it, I could pretty clearly see it was my serial number! Also, his location on Facebook (he forgot to turn off location sharing for messaging) showed the same address my laptop showed up on Find My Mac/iCloud back in February. Worked with the Pflugerville PD this week, including giving them my login info for an old fake Facebook account i used years ago to pull a prank on someone. Yesterday I watched live on Facebook as the messaged back and forth with the guy selling it, but then the guy stopped responding after an hour. I figured he smelled cops, but this morning after getting to work I got a call from PPD to come pick up my laptop!

Likely the guy who had it was letting one of the thieves who got away that day stay with him in February. In March that guy got picked up, and the seller took the laptop he left at the house. He gave the cops some story of how he bought it from someone else and didn't know it was stolen, but thought it was weird that the black guy that sold it to him had a picture of a white baby for the background on it

Big props to PPD for the assistance in setting up the sting/buy today! I asked if I could have a deputy badge since I did all the leg work, but they just laughed at me... oh well

It's also my experience that actual police are the worst people in the world at doing actual police work. Detective type stuff is what I mean. I'm surprised they were able to understand the logic of how you found the perp. You must be a great communicator.